Digest: Breaking Down and Assimilating Eating Disorder Recovery, Popular Culture, Whatever

I Do Not Fail to Post Because I Do Not Care

2008-07-19T15:02:00.001-05:00

Three of the top reasons why I’ve been on blog hiatus:

1.) Moving into a new home. Imagine a walk-in closet. Subtract 100 square feet. Fill it with entirely too many books and clothes that fit a body and/or a lifestyle that I no longer have—the clothes, not so much the books. Situate it in the coolest part of the city I know. Use vertical space accordingly.

2.) A lovely visit from my parents. Leaving the Northeast to come to Houston in July requires true devotion . . . and nearly-expired airline vouchers. Seriously, the week with them was awesome. I wish I could have cancelled their flight home.

3.) No home internet access at present. If work were slower during the week (yes, I’m in the office right now catching up on work), I could pilfer bandwidth while I’m at the office during the day, but it hasn’t been, so I haven’t been. Instead, I’m living light on the ‘net and, yes, feeling withdrawal.

More soon . . . .

Feel Free to Observe How I Crazy I Am . . . .

2008-07-07T05:07:00.004-05:00

This past Thursday evening, after work, after getting the keys to my new apartment (woo-hoo!), I decided to take a nap. Whatever other activities might eventually take place that evening, I decided, would have to occur after I got some sleep.

I’m positively awful about getting proper amounts of rest during the work week. I’m pretty ashamed of how little I function on, even with my lunch time naps. I’m ashamed because it’s pretty juvenile: I do something dumb and self-defeating because I’m petulant and pissy about not wanting to admit that my body & mind require sleep. Often, sleep feels like this little death, this failure, this miniature defeat against consciousness. I frequently find myself sort of resentful that I must concede to it. I hate that I NEED it. I don’t want to need it. So, like some absurd sleep anorectic, I fight sleep until the very last moment, even if I know rationally that doing so damages me. I’ll usually dope myself up with enough caffeine pills to make a Thoroughbred’s heart explode before I’ll get a solid eight hours of shut-eye. My naps at lunch result from necessity more than pleasure. Just like I wish that, in a perfect world, I could do without food without hurting myself, I wish that I could do without sleep too. Why don’t they make pills to faithfully replicate this shit? Wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot easier not to have to contend with this stuff? To just LIVE without having to cater to these complicated frailties? They’re such a pain in the ass, such an interruption from the rest of life.

Anyway . . . I admit that I’d been sleeping about three hours each night for several nights preceding Thursday. So, my body was clearly in need of rest. So, when I laid down on Thursday evening, I resolved to set no alarms. Since Friday was a holiday, everything could wait for me to get some rest. I ended up napping for about three hours. What was startling, though, was the dream I had whilst asleep. It was extremely vivid, but more significantly, it was a version of a scenario I’ve seen recur in my dreams many times in the past few years. It’s a disturbing string of events, but by no means a nightmarish one. It’s just psychologically potent and definitely pretty crazy-heavy on the metaphors. This dream almost always pops up when I’m stressed in my waking life but not expressing my emotions very well. I actually don’t mind having it really: it signals to me that I need to take care of myself. It’s like a big ol’ semaphore from my own subconscious.

I don’t think that my fucked-up sleep routine during the week allows my brain to dream very much, unfortunately. Even when I am sleeping at night, I don’t think I sleep deeply since I am pretty concerned about (a) whatever activity (whether good, bad, or neutral) was keeping me up so late, and, more significantly, (b) hauling my sorry ass out of bed in time for work in the morning. During the week, I’m always terrified when I finally do go to bed. I’m terrified that I won’t be able to wake up. (Incidentally, when I try to force myself to go to bed early, I’m usually terrified that I won’t be able to fall quickly to sleep. I dread laying in bed without being able to fall to sleep. Ugh.) That’s a lot of terror surrounding what is supposed to be a daily function, huh? So, there’s like a DREAM EXPLOSION when I do finally unwind and sleep deeply for more than twenty freaking minutes.

My poor brain. While the exact nature of sleep’s utility for the brain remains unclear, the hypothesis that some sort of sorting-and-dumping process goes on when we rest is pretty well-accepted. Sleep—and the dream activity that takes place during it—is a major waste management tool for our brains. Our cognition—if not our psychic well-being—gets seriously impaired with inadequate sleep. Jesus. I know this. I KNOW this. (I also hear that starving yourself isn’t good for you either . . . .) Sometimes I imagine how much smarter I might be if I both slept and ate properly. That makes me sad. Good thing sleep deprivation keeps my attention span too short to dwell on that fact too long and my retention rate too low to remember it when I do. Right? Right?

Last night, around 7:45 p.m. or so, I felt very drowsy. I had other tasks I wanted/needed to accomplish, but I decided that I would lay down for a brief nap to counteract that (stupid!) feeling of tiredness. I even set my alarm for twenty minutes later. While I must have woken up to turn off the alarm, I do not recall genuinely regaining consciousness until a little after 3 a.m. (I am notorious for turning off alarms, even ones placed some distance away from my bed, without truly waking up.) Since I usually get up shortly after 5 during the week anyhow, and I had evidently slept a greater number of hours straight than I had in weeks, I decided to just go ahead and start my day. I don’t know how this will impact the rest of my day or my sleep schedule tonight, but I do know that my body won another sleep battle yesterday. But what of the war?

This may be (one of the reasons) why I’m still in therapy. It may also be one of the reasons why I’m so damned cranky.

But Still Going

2008-07-05T21:36:00.003-05:00

I'm moving, preparing for visitors, taking care of some hardcore personal/practical arrangements, covering responsibilities for a vacationing coworker, and generally about three lines away from losing the fucking plot.

But okay. Okay.

No stress is worse than being dead. That I'm alive to be able to be stressed is better than the alternative. There's that. I won't forget it. Sound morbid? Maybe. But it does the trick.

And there's this: the older I get, the more I live, the more I can look back at a growing list of what I've gotten through. The stuff I didn't feel like I could do, get through, get past, whatever. Yet, somehow I did. I always did. Somehow, some way. I've got more and more past examples to look to that suggest that I will get through this too, whatever this may be. My own history provides me with the strength and confidence to keep going.

Slowly.

Fitfully.

But still going.

Like Sausage Being Made When Put On; Like Sausage Being Un-Made When Coming Off

2008-07-02T06:14:00.004-05:00

I've blogged before about my travails with panty hose, including my own likening of the removal of hose at the end of a long day to stripping the casing off of a sausage. This history, indeed, makes "The Three Best Bits of Relationship Advice I've Ever Been Given" by Sarah Brown of Que Sera Sera hit the mark. I'm thanking Nika for the link!

On the topic of Nika, her photographs and observations of Tbilisi on Day in the World have, of late, been a tonic to my own office space myopia. I'm thanking her for that too.

Would You Trust This Man With Your Grapes?

2008-07-01T21:46:00.009-05:00

What if he had a (relatively) swank, (relatively) understated marketing campaign like this to promote his new line of products?

That's right kids: rapper Lil Jon has moved up from mere Crunk Juice with Little Jonathan Winery.

Eating Disorders: It's Complicated

2008-07-01T21:46:00.005-05:00

I highly recommend Building Beauty Beyond Body's post on "I'm A Boy Anorexic." Come to think of it, I recommend the whole blog--insightful, well-written, candid. Definitely worth a look.

I worry about the sensationalism of the BBC America special described in BBB's post. However, I'm all for exploding the assumption that men & boys are not subject to eating disorders. If "I'm A Boy Anorexic" does that, so much the better. Now, if we could have similar programs like "I'm An Anorexic Over the Age of Thirty," "I'm A Non-White Anorexic," etc., etc.

What are some of the other popular stereotypes about eating disorder sufferers that our culture needs to be disabused of? What do the uninformed masses in our society assume about eating disorders?

In addition to the above-suggested triad of gender, age, and ethnicity/race, consider how people often assume that someone does not have an eating disorder if someone

is a normal (or above normal) weight,

is not fashion-obsessed, "vain," or concerned with conventional beauty,

was not raised in a controlling family,

is athletic,

can be witnessed eating,

talks positively about food while with others,

is not overtly depressed,

etc.

Indeed, eating disorders are much more complicated than that.

Now, I do understand the convenience and utility of profiles of pathology. I understand that certain characteristics correlate more strongly with eating disorders. So, it's not ridiculous to let that information guide us. However, over-emphasizing those data about what the average eating disorder sufferer looks (or thinks) like is dangerous.

2008-06-30T06:08:00.002-05:00

"Money matters but less than we think and not in the way we think. Family is important. So are friends. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude."

--Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

The One I May Like

2008-06-28T09:41:00.004-05:00

I can't decide whether I'm minorly in love with the photography site The Ones We Love . . . or whether much of it just looks like an Urban Outfitters catalog and/or a Nylon fashion spread . . . or whether it does look like that but, since I like both UO & Nylon, I like it because much of the photography does look like that. Hmmm.

Or maybe I just like it 'cause it's aim is vaguely reminiscent of the Dogme 95 film movement, the sonnet & haiku forms, portraiture in painting, and virtually every other experiment with the imagination & artistic craft flourishing under constraint.

By the its own description:

The Ones We Love is a project highlighting young and talented photographers from around the world. Each artist contributed six photographs of the person(s) who is most important to them, taken outdoors in a natural setting. The goal of the website is to portray the people who are loved, cherished, and inspirational to these artists, and also showcase the differences and similarities in the photographs each of them took within the same guidelines.

My jury is still out.

Kazin on Arendt

2008-06-26T06:22:00.004-05:00

Hitler's war was the central fact in the dark shadowy Morningside Drive apartment where she and her feisty husband, Heinrich Bluecher, now lived, taking in a boarder to make ends meet. Hannah never stopped thinking. What she thought about was uprooting in every sense: starting with the uprooting of whole people that had washed up on the West Side, this specialist in St Augustine had turned her life into a voracious political inquiry. How did it happen? How had it all happened? How had this modern age happened? The boarder could be heard walking down the hall to the toilet. She rocked that dark flat with the flushing of the toilet; walked back to her room. Hannah paused ever so slightly in her explication of the police state. She had been brought up in a genteel upper-middle-class Jewish family in Koenigsberg. She had studied with Bultmann! Dibelius! Heidegger! Husserl! Jaspers! She had written her doctoral thesis at Heidelberg on Augustine's concept of love! With a little smile, she resumed her analysis of the police state.

--from New York Jew by Michael Kazin

2008-06-25T06:31:00.002-05:00

The comments on my last office friendship post are well-taken. Even though I’m pretty confident about the nature of some of my these friendships, I must confess a blithering ignorance generally when it comes to relating to men who aren’t academics/eccentrics/etc. How does this stuff work in “the real world” anyhow? I’m not sure that my instincts are very keen in this arena.

I have had numerous encounters with what I felt to be improper advances. So, I am willing to rebuff when necessary. One such instance, involved a young married man I met through work connections, though not in my office. Our socializing started with business lunches with others, then weekday lunches that were not expressly professional but more social. We would occasionally meet for one or two drinks after our respective work days finished. It seemed like a fairly organic progression to “friends” instead of mere “business contacts.” I liked him well enough to want to be friends. However, two primary factors prevented me from continuing to see him. (1) He was excessively flattering, overtly fawning even, about me, especially my appearance. I’m all for compliments, and I’m pretty comfortable with compliments about my appearance even from men. But there’s a limit some place beyond a male friend or coworker saying, “That dress you’re wearing looks really nice on you” or “Your hair looks good today” . . . and somebody repeatedly texting me telling what a “sweet ass” I’ve got. (2) Despite my repeated invitations, he never appeared interested in incorporating his wife in our socializing. He wanted to meet at a bar or go to see bands play or go to a movie . . . all while his wife was at home with his child. When I would suggest that we do fun things that would allow her to be involved, I’d get no response. That seemed fishy. I joked for a while about requiring a permission slip from his wife in order for him to hang out in her absence. Eventually, I just decided that this was probably a situation I didn’t want to be a part of.

I have always had plenty of male friends. I have male friends who are married. When I was married, I had male friends who were single. I would—and still do—hang out with married men without their wives around, or with single men without any additional friends around. I’ve managed to do this without anything untoward going on. Significantly, though, I generally think that it’s a good idea that I also be friends with a married male friend’s wife, even if I sometimes see the husband alone, even if I’m in fact closer pals with the husband than the wife. This speaks to the heart of Anonymous’s comments on my previous post, I think, viz. if someone’s got nothing to hide, then they won’t hide anything, right?

Just color me clueless.

I Love You Too, Universe

2008-06-25T06:07:00.003-05:00

Always keep in mind, T.S., that no matter what has happened, you did the very best you could.

And so did those who may have let you down.

Love,
The Universe

2008-06-23T06:04:00.007-05:00

Remember the childhood cliché about kids being "secret friends," i.e. two kids play together but the one ignores the other when in the company of others? As aconsolation, the non-acknowledging child avers that the two are "secret friends." Yeah, it's kind of like that. Well, no, not so bad as all that. But still.

Since assuming this job late last year, I have struck up friendships of various sorts with several people at work who are, shall we say,"above my pay grade." All well and good—many of them are rather awesome people and I love spending time with them. Some of it has been some of the most satisfying, stimulating socializing I've done in recent memory. And, naturally, I like that they are interested in me too.
But it's awkward when we're back in the office and, while unmistakably cordial & friendly, they are "discreet" about the extent of our out-of-office
socializing.

"Discreet." That's the damned word one of them most recently used. So, he's bananas for me when it's the two of us. But . . . .

An irony of the situation is that several of the people in the same professional circle are all coy and dodgy—"discreet"—about their out-of-office friendships with me. With each other and their peers, they dance round the fact that each of them sees me socially outside of work. It seems retarded and weird. For fuck's sake. It's like for certain people, going out with me alone is analogous to masturbation or
bowel movements or something—everybody does it, everybody enjoys it, but nobody talks about it. Except maybe in veiled terms, hedgy euphemisms.

Yet, I understand. I understand that it's strange for the captains of
industry to be hanging out with the office riff-raff. I am kind of
hoi polloi to their aristocracy. When we are just relating to one
another as people over pint glasses, that's merely a source of
curiosity, if that. When we are in our professional environment, it
potentially seems inappropriate. Or, at least, complicated. The
circumstances are made no easier by the fact that we are of opposite
sexes. Why complicate work life more than necessary? Why invite
askance glances—to say nothing of lawsuits—because an older, more
professionally powerful man is spending time outside of work with a
younger, less-senior woman? Yeah, I get it. I do.

There’s much to be said for avoiding wrong impressions in the workplace. No proverbial eye may bat when other women and I are pals-y outside the office. Certainly no one discourages open comraderie in the office, even between different levels of management and certainly between members of both sexes. But, yes, someone might get the wrong idea if the young, single, female office nothing is fraternizing unsupervised with an older (often married), male muckety-muck. I may know my boundaries, but others do not necessarily. Nothing improper may be going on between us, but do the vintners of the office grapevine know that? My counterparts in these friendships stand to lose the most from any mistaken appearance of wrongdoing, but I too have a reputation to protect. I hope for many things in my life: to be erroneously marked as the blonde Monica Lewinsky of my corporation is not among them.

It can still feel sort of crappy, though. All this understanding, and it can still feel crappy.

My intentions are innocent, and I’m only friends with those whose intentions I believe to be innocent too. I want to discuss, for example, EU corporate tax policy with finance folks from overseas—and a billion other topics that I’m curious about that they know lots about that there is not time for in the work day. Not only am I (obviously) on a frothing Irish development econ kick at the moment, but I am positively enthralled by stories from our Irish guys who grew up in or near Ulster and who actually endured the Troubles at their worst. I find these people pretty fascinating. I want to ask them questions. I am not bored by them. I am not a trollop; I just hate being bored and seize opportunities to be stimulated. Wait. Okay. Lousy word choice there.

If I had a husband to trot along to these outings to make them less dubious, I would. If I was older or male or whatever, I would still have the same interest in these friendships. All those factors might make the situation less threatening to conventional sensibilities, but it would not change the substance of these relationships. The substance does not need to change.

Again, I get it. Again, it sometimes feels like a bit of crap.

Rant ending . . . .

Short:Man::Fat:Woman

2008-06-22T13:24:00.003-05:00

Perfectionism.

Self-loathing.

Asserting control.

Cultural expectations.

Body obsession.

Body dysmorphia.

Even the (often creepy) online communities.

Are we talking about anorexia/bulimia? Are we talking about women? Are we talking about weight? Nope.

In the June/July 2008 issue of Details magazine, Elisa Ludwig writes a very competent article entitled "How Far Would You Go to Get Taller? Why an increasing number of vertically challenged men are subjecting themselves to excruciatingly painful leg-lengthening surgery." Read it and you might just think that you are reading about women willing to suffer and destroy themselves to be thin.

The Anniversary

2008-06-20T08:36:00.005-05:00

Ten years ago today, I attended a wedding. My own wedding. Less than six years later, I separated from my husband.

A marked existential fissure tore through me directly prior to my departure. 'Nervous breakdown' does not seem an inappropriate term. I ripped in two. Soon I was gone and not looking back. Years of travail led up to that rift, though; it was only that I finally reached a breaking point. Depression, anxiety, incompatible values, sickness, infertility, miscarriage. Rejection. Abandonment. One person desperate for change; the other fundamentally recalcitrant towards it. Our house was badly divided. Indeed, it could not stand. It did not stand.

When I left my spouse, I also lost the friendship and approval of many of the traditional Christians with whom I had shared my life for years beforehand. They simply could not seem to accept that I could not repent for my choice to divorce. I could regret the harm my choice caused others, but I could not truly apologize for--much less, turn away from--my decision to end my marriage. Their rejection hurt me deeply. Ultimately, though, just as I made my decision and stood by it, so they did theirs. All I could do was accept that, since I certainly couldn't change it.

This acceptance did not come quickly, however. My eating disorder began when my marriage ended, slowly at first. I vomited my lack of acceptance into many toilets, many times over. I refused my desire for their love as I refused my desire for food, even as my body became cadaverous. And my shrinking body told them all--my ex-husband, my ex-friends--to fuck off: I was going to be AWESOME. I had been chubby and self-doubting and needy; I committed myself to become beautiful and confident and powerful. I was going to live on my own terms now, and I was going to show them and everyone else how different that life on those terms could be.

Even as I descended into anorexia and bulimia, it was not all pathology.

So, I don't regret my divorce. Neither, though, do I especially regret my marriage. Foolhardy and doomed as it might have been, my marriage taught me a great deal about myself and the world. I would not be the person I am today had I not spent those years as my ex-husband's wife, neither either with the eating disorder that followed.

I don't mourn my ten-year wedding anniversary, though I don't celebrate it in any conventional sense. I just notice it. Notice who I was then, who I am now, and where I've been to bring me to this present point.

I'll break a wine glass to that.

2008-06-17T06:17:00.004-05:00

“ . . . He, Schtitt, knew real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game’s technicians revered, but in fact the opposite—not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty. That real tennis was no more reducible to delimited factors or probability curves than chess or boxing, the two games of which it’s a hybrid. In short, Schtitt and the tall A.E.C. optics man (i.e. Incandenza), whose fierce flat serve-and-haul-ass-to-the-net approach to the game had carried him through M.I.T. on a full ride with stipend, and whose consulting report on high-speed photoelectric tracking the U.S.T. A. mucky-mucks found dense past all comprehending, found themselves totally simpatico on tennis in the paradoxical terms of what’s now called ‘Extra-Linear Dynamics.’ And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartener, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but—perversely—of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth—each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n-squared possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self . . . .”

--pages 81-2, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

No, It's Not About Legalizing Gay Marriage In California

2008-06-16T05:48:00.009-05:00

Arguably the best explanation I’ve read (or heard) of the Treaty of Lisbon is Jamie Smyth’s six-part series for the Irish Times, "Lisbon Explained." Whether you have no fucking clue what treaty I’m even talking about or you are instead ready to contemplate the intricacies of European federalism, Smyth is ready to help you out.

As I mentioned to a friend with whom I shared these articles earlier, I can't help but wish that I encountered more examples of journalism like this. How awesome would it be if more (American) journalists exercised the Fourth Estate's duty to the public by explaining in such detail and with such insight complicated matters of public policy? Awesome, indeed, I think.

Read:

PART ONE: What is the Lisbon Treaty?,

PART TWO:Does the Lisbon Treaty create new rights, values or competences, or is it old wine in new bottles?

PART THREE: Do small states and democracy lose out? The amendments to the EU institutions proposed in Lisbon are by no means a perfect solution but, when compared with existing practices, represent a step forward in terms of democratic
accountability,

PART FOUR: Can EU be a unified voice on the world stage? The treaty maintains intergovernmental decision making on foreign policy, but two new positions and an
external action force could provide greater co-ordination for the EU's international dealings

PART FIVE: Neutrality undermined, or peacekeeping enhanced? Does Lisbon undermine Irish neutrality and create a militarised EU or strengthen its peacekeeping abilities?

PART SIX: Is Ireland's tax regime threatened? It is clear that some states want more
integration in the tax field. But Lisbion makes no significant amendments to articles dealing with corporate tax policy

Katt, Barry, & Me

2008-06-15T22:43:00.004-05:00

What a weird thing to watch"Katt Williams: The Pimp Chronicles Pt 1" and "Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater" in the same evening, one following the other.

What a weirder thing to enjoy them both.

More Art I Would Buy If My Budget Permitted: APAK!

2008-06-11T06:17:00.004-05:00

Artistic duo Apak's paper-based work is cool & all, but it's Apak's mixed-media sculpture that really gets me going. Experience more Apak goodness here.

I Send Myself on a Fool's Errand Every Day

2008-06-10T08:30:00.002-05:00

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate commuting? I fucking do. I estimate that years of my life have been squandered staring at the brake lights of the car in front of me. HOURS a day. No amount of NPR, no number of audio books, no capacious iPod, no vivid imagination can overcome the mind-numbing, soul-sapping, muscle-atrophying agony of inching through rush-hour traffic with millions of other Houstonians too hobbled by mitigating factors to either live closer to where they work or utilize public transport. I love this city—named recently by Kiplinger’s as the best metro area in the U.S. for 2008—but I hate how car-dependent it is. I hate its sprawl, its virtually non-existent, generally impractical mass transit system, its stupid, stupid traffic. I won’t even mention the size of my monthly fuel budget; to do so will cause a minor seizure.

There have been days in Houston when I have spent more hours in my fucking car than in my bed. I’m wont to get insufficient sleep, yes, but still. Jesus.

Granted, my ailing car does not help matters any. My a/c only works when I’m traveling at high speeds. The engine begins to over-heat when I’m traveling slower than thirty miles per hour for more than a couple of minutes. This means that much of the time that I’m commuting, I’m also worried that my car will explode (or that I’ll be late to wherever I’m going because I’ll need to stop repeatedly on the way to let my engine cool a bit so that my car does not explode) and stewing in my own sweat. Nothing but engine-hot air is available through my vents when I’m inching along in stop-and-go traffic. With heat indices in Houston topping 100 degrees--even off the baking asphalt of the freeways, even outside of a big, broiling metal box, surrounded by other big, broiling metal boxes—the approaching summer worsens my drive each day. What will burst into a fireball first—my car or me? I pray for rain. I pray for breeze. I pray for shade. I can’t tell whether I’m crying or just sweating out of my damned eyes.

I typically don’t get angry in traffic, though I admit that I do sometimes get rather frustrated. Even if I loathe the situation, I’m usually fairly placid during my commute, probably for two reasons. (1) I am almost never SHOCKED by the length or nature of my commute since it happens day after day after day, so it seems a terrible waste of energy, if not almost disingenuous, to let it actually agitate me when I—gasp!—discover that the freeways are chock-a-block at 5:30 p.m. (Even quiet misery and agitation are not the same, mind you.) (2) I’m too fucking hot to move or raise my blood pressure any more than I must. My goal: to be as cool & inert as possible, emotionally and physically, even if each may seem a losing venture on some days.

On the upside, I confess that I have taken to using as much of my time on the road for other activities as I can. The aforementioned audio entertainment serves me pretty well, especially the audio books. And I’m not sure how terribly unsafe talking on my mobile phone or text-messaging truly is, public perceptions to the contrary notwithstanding, when I am poking along at five miles per hour. I curl my eyelashes while in traffic. I floss my teeth. I have even manicured my nails more than once—cuticles, filing, trimming, buffing, multiple coats of polish—whiling away in the gridlock. I smoke too much on the road, I know, but since I have to sit in traffic with my windows down, I guess that a little bit more carbon monoxide from cigarettes is probably a mere pint in the sea of vehicle exhaust drawn into my lungs. All this and I’m still open to suggestions for how else to keep from going positively mad.

It’s madness, but it’s madness I choose. For today, at least.

NOT A "Kitchen Nightmare"

2008-06-08T08:44:00.004-05:00

Last night I dreamt that I was married to Gordon Ramsay. Second night in a row, actually.

Paradoxical, yes, that I should have a celebrity crush on a chef, of all people.

What's the Greater Assassination Threat: Racist Extremism or Clintonian Ambition?

2008-06-05T06:22:00.006-05:00

Dear Senator Obama,

I won't pretend to tell you who you ought to select as your running mate for this Presidential election campaign. But I'm just saying that the last person I would want to be next in line for my job should any ill fate befall me is the person who I know most wants my job.

I'm just saying.

Stay safe,

Tamara

Celtic Tigers Don't Always Purr

2008-06-04T06:13:00.004-05:00

As my previous post demonstrates, I am fascinated by the Celtic Tiger phenomenon at the moment. However, Irish economics is not all fun and games. Witness this Irish Times article reporting on the tax shortfall caused by the drop in VAT receipts.

The sort of situation described by this article may draw out some of the more compelling arguments I can instantly think of for why sales taxes (like VAT) are NOT the altogether brilliant alternative to others sources of tax revenue that I would like them to be.

I like sales tax as an alternative to other streams of government funding for many reasons. A prima facie advantage of taxing consumption would seem to be greater fairness, as taxpayers only pay for what they use, so to speak. This equity only withstands scrutiny, however, if we are not talking about the very poor or the very affluent, or if we vary application of sales tax with certain consumables—for example, not taxing basic foodstuffs like milk and bread. An 8% tax on a gallon of milk would have a very different relative impact on someone who makes $12,000 per year than on someone who makes $36,000 per year. To say nothing of the difference between either of those citizens and an extremely wealthy one. Yet each of these consumers might well need that gallon of milk. No matter how low the consumer’s income, milk may not be discretionary in the way that a yacht would be. The sales tax on milk will hit the poor harder than it will the rich because tax dollars derived from non-discretionary expenditures will account for a greater portion of the poorer individual’s income. Yet, unlike the yacht, we are not justified in simply quipping that the individual ought to manage her finances differently, i.e. if she can’t afford the purchase, she ought to not make it. Still, the pay-for-use quality of sales taxes, rewards individuals for personal thrift by reducing their tax burdens should they consume less, while benefitting the tax base when people are more inclined to spend.

Here’s the rub, though, the one that Ireland’s present VAT shortfall demonstrates: While all sources of tax revenue fluctuate—income, property, corporate, etc.—sales taxes are far more mutable and far more swiftly so. This volatility creates budgeting problems, as the predictions necessary for financial planning are less reliable when a greater percentage of the budget depends upon revenue generated by consumer purchases. While emerging trends in, say, a declining housing sector may indicate to analysts and policy-makers that less revenue from that segment of the tax base should be estimated for future, consumer spending is prone to sharper peaks and dips instead of gentler swells and lulls. Sensitive to a multitude of other factors, it’s a touchier value than other tax sources. How can we plan government spending when we don’t know how much money will be coming in?

I still, as a general matter, love sales taxes more than income taxes or property taxes. I’m simply saying that Ireland’s current quandary illustrates why the gleaming knight’s armor is not without chinks.

The next salient question, then: How can we make this work? How can we circumvent this snag with sales tax so that we can utilize it as a dominant way of paying for government? Three possibilities jump to my little mind.

First, we might try to develop better econometrics for predicting future consumer spending. The more nuanced our tools for following the trends, the more accurate our estimates for budgets will be. As I suggest above, consumer spending is notoriously tricky, fickle stuff. (Note, for example, the implication of this quote from the IT article on VAT revenue: “The only ray of light on the Government's tax horizon is the performance of income tax. In the five months to May, income tax brought in €32 million more than expected. This suggests that declining activity levels have yet to be mirrored in the numbers at work.” Even anectodally, this illustrates how “lag times” for different revenue streams are different for different types economic shifts.) We need to create innovative ways of correlating other data with historical shifts in individual consumption.

Shouldn’t we too, though, consider greater liquidity as an economic strategy? If government coffers retained more liquid assets, they would be less hobbled by decreases in consumption tax revenue. With so many of its resources bound up in fixed assets, the government is less nimble when faced with changing conditions. Just like an individual who has all of her assets in financial products like, say, CDs (‘certificates of deposit,’ not ‘compact discs’) or real estate is less able to adapt to a suddenly diminished income than someone who retains a certain portion of her wealth in, say, a savings account, a similar principle could apply to governments. There are advantages—both for corporations/governments and for individuals—to have less liquidity floating around, but that doesn’t mean that there is no benefit to, under these circumstances, increasing the amount available from current norms.

Finally, might we not try some imaginative way to create greater flexibility in government budgeting? Implicitly, most individual citizens operate on a personal budget that might be described as “tiered.” That is, there are top-tier expenses like bare-minimum food and housing costs, with other expenditures ranked in descending priority from there. As the individual’s circumstances change—whether temporarily or in concert with a persistent trend—the tiers actually included in their operating budget change. If a person takes a week of unpaid vacation leave one month, she might temporarily suspend the part of her routine budget that allows for purchasing clothes, books, entertainment, etc. This phenomenon ordinarily seems natural and unspoken in the case of individuals. What if governments designed budgets that explicitly mimicked this strategy?

Now, WHY a municipality or state would/should be spending money in the first place that it doesn’t absolutely HAVE to is another matter for another stream of thought, probably a fiercely libertarian one . . . .

p.s.--This is why it takes me forever to get through reading the news headlines in the morning.

p.p.s.--Yes, this IS how I have fun.

The Wisdom of the Tiger

2008-06-03T06:05:00.004-05:00

When discussing hope, change, development, and prosperity in America, in this Presidential election year—or any other time, for that matter—why don’t more of high-profile policy-makers cite the Celtic Tiger?

What policies did the Republic implement to effect such radical change in such a limited time? What lessons can the United States learn? What concrete steps can we take, if we are, indeed, as serious about hope and change as our Presidential candidates all claim?

I don’t understand why vagueness and posturing satisfies the American electorate when actual examples of dramatic, tangible economic and social success exist. We could demand actual, quantifiable gains. Instead, we settle for less. Perhaps we have not because we ask not.

R.I.P. YSL

2008-06-02T06:03:00.004-05:00

Thank you for making a sliver of the world more beautiful while you were here.

The Semiotics of Baked Goods

2008-06-01T08:55:00.004-05:00

I must like a person if I eat a blueberry muffin he brings me, even though I’ve already had breakfast. I’m not sure if that’s “right,” since it’s not “necessary” eating. But doing so felt like embracing a kindness that I wanted to embrace.

I often find it difficult to know when I am supposed to eat something like this. Is it more or less eating-disordered to consume food for reasons aside from hunger and/or the need for nutrition? Sometimes food is more than physical nourishment, right? Sometimes it’s a language human beings speak to one another.

When I was in the hospital, one of my anorexic peers, a devout Catholic, began to refuse the Eucharist because she didn’t want to digest the Communion wafers or wine. Never mind the theological puzzles of the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation—what is the caloric content of the Body of Christ if Catholics believe that the wafer, once consecrated, actually become the flesh of Jesus?—this was the apotheosis of sadness to me. It illustrated so beautifully and so terribly the costs of anorexia. Didn’t this refusal demonstrate a chilling unwillingness to accept any role for the consumption of food aside from brute physical survival?

I know that “emotional eating” is a disordered behavior similar to restriction or purging. I also know that not every instance of pathological emotional eating necessarily results in a binge in order to be pathological. But I also know that a space must exist for eating for what might be considered emotional or social reasons. My instincts are weak with respect to these distinctions; I often lack the confidence in my own instant judgments.

He—he of the muffin-giving--might not have even known if I hadn’t actually eaten the muffin. I could have accepted it, thanking him for it, but then set it aside surreptitiously. He need not have been aware of any possible apparent ingratitude. He would not have known of any such affront. Still, even knowing this, I wanted to eat the muffin. I didn’t feel duty-bound to eat it. No sense of obligation weighed on me that I HAD TO eat it, whether I liked it or not. (In that case, I probably would have resented both him and the muffin. Neither resentment obtained in this situation.) And, no, I didn’t truly want the muffin qua food. Instead, I WANTED to eat it because of what eating the muffin symbolized, what it stood for, what it meant, viz. a willing accepting of a thoughtful act of generosity on his part. I was not eating flour and eggs and sugar and blueberries. I was eating a signifier.

A language spoken not with phonemes but food. We express meaning. What matters? What do we think? What do we feel? What do we want to communicate?